Global Manifestation

Three years ago when I was writing about the need for and the effect of sabbath especially as we distinguish it from Sunday I said this:

Before you think I'm screaming conspiracy theories or fashioning tin foil hats know this:  I believe it was and is meant for the whole planet when God commands those words that help to form a nation: "Remember the sabbath day to keep it holy."  I believe that was and is for the whole planet that on the seventh day God rested -- read slept -- and as a creator was silent. 

There is a holiness intended by God in our Sundays, our sabbaths, our silence, and our sleep.  It is a holiness meant for the whole world.

My focus is on the phrase "meant for the whole world."  I'm pretty sure that what we do as a worshipping community, in a county seat town in "Georgia's Lake Country" has greater implications.  But somehow when we seem too easily to slip into busying ourselves with accounting and carrying around bits and pieces of offence and disappointment our world shrinks.

Whenever we get too insular, too self-pitying, too dependent on "the way things always have been" more than anything we are preventing that expansive, creative, spirit-freeing turn God expects us to take.

Whenever we constrict our hearts, the ego-impulse to defend and enlarge our impact has to overcompensate and drives us to pile on the bits and pieces to build what is really a substitute for faith and trust and grace.

Remember Pharoah's "high control needs" and his ordering the Israelites to work 7 days a week making bricks thus preventing their sabbath observance?  They wouldn't stand for it and with God's help made their way first to sabbath in a wilderness until they came home to the land God had promised.  

Sadly on the way even they succumbed to the beast of control and melted their "bits and pieces" of gold -- much of which was handed to them by the Egyptians -- into a idol, a false god of self glorification.

If we remember that our creator God slept -- gave up control -- and in so doing made way for the world he had made to become something more in freedom and trust and rest, then even we might better live together in this historic middle Georgia refuge and not just for ourselves.  

We each have our part but each of us has just a part.  It will not do for us just to pile up the bits and pieces, or endlessly to pull our boot straps, there's no sabbath there.